Half tone laser recording apparatus

Abstract

A laser recording recording apparatus including a semiconductor laser as a light source and enabling half-tone recording. The apparatus includes a recording medium moving in a sub-scanning direction, M semiconductor lasers arranged along the sub-scanning direction at a slight distance to one another and enabled to be independently modulated according to image signals, where M is an integral number of at least two, a deflector for deflecting M laser beams emitted from the M semiconductor lasers toward the recording medium and for scanning the beams in a main scanning direction, and an image forming optical system for imaging the deflected laser beams at a predetermined distance between one another along the sub-scanning direction. An exposure pattern on the recording medium is represented by a pixel matrix comprising N.times.L micro pixels, where N is the number of micro pixels with respect to said main scanning direction and L is the number of micro pixels with respect to the sub-scanning direction, and the exposure pattern is varied according to a density information included in the image signal thereby to record half-tone, where L is an integral number of times M.